Dallas County DA Susan Hawk's pre-campaign political calculation is pretty clear. She and her advisers apparently concluded that she would have been unelectable had she divulged her treatment for dependence on prescription drugs.

I think that's right, probably and unfortunately.

She was trying to knock off an incumbent, Craig Watkins, who was carrying baggage into last year's campaign. She had to make the case for a clean start in the DA's office. The message was: No more chaos, no more drama, no more corruption. I will run a professional office with straight shooting from now on.

Could she have added, "And oh, by the way, I've kicked my drug habit."?

I think voters wouldn't have gone for that. Sure, the American public is all for second chances. But that's typically for people the public knows and likes, more or less.

You give a friend or your own misbehaving kids a second chance, not the stranger or the brats down the street.

Hawk's profile was pretty low entering the 2014 campaign. Her judgeship hadn't brought her much name recognition. It probably wasn't possible to launch a campaign introducing her to voters and simultaneously asking their forbearance for a drug addiction, even though it was the prescription kind.

That's not to justify the line she fed The News in 2013 about going to an East Coast facility for surgery to relieve back pain. Instead, she was headed west to wean herself off pain killers.

The strategy was to tell a lie and hope to get away with it. But she didn't.

As with so many things, the big problem became the cover-up.

Here's what's too bad about that. Millions of Americans have chronic pain and take prescription drugs to deal with it. Pain-killer use and abuse is widely described as epidemic. From The New Yorker:

By 2010, the United States, with about five per cent of the world’s population, was consuming ninety-nine per cent of the world’s hydrocodone (the narcotic in Vicodin), along with eighty per cent of the oxycodone (in Percocet and OxyContin), and sixty-five per cent of the hydromorphone (in Dilaudid).

As narcotics prescriptions surged, so did deaths from opioid-analgesic overdoses—from about four thousand to almost seventeen thousand. Studies have shown that patients who receive narcotics for chronic pain are less likely to recover function, and are less likely to go back to work. The potential side effects of prescription narcotics include constipation, sexual dysfunction, cognitive impairment, addiction, and overdosing.

Assume Hawk knew or was experiencing the negatives. Good for her for making the decision to get clean. Had she done it publicly, lots of people would have identified with her struggle. But the campaign would have fallen miserably short, in my view.

She would have been a healthier person but an impaired candidate.

Would there have been a middle ground between telling a lie and fully divulging the rehab?

How about this: Spirit her away to the dry-out facility and refuse to discuss the reason for her absence. Let reporters ask, but don't tell them anything. Say, "It's for an undisclosed health condition." Let them ask followups. Say, "We've told you all we're going to say. This is private." Believe me, reporters often lose interest when they hear the same thing over and over.

And I don't think Watkins would have pressed the matter. He had his own issues to deal with.